There is a much wider spectrum of opinions on the Russian side
Pro-Russian doesn't have to mean pro-Putin
The western mainstream media likes to push the narrative that Russia doesn’t have a free press or a real democracy, that news channels are taken off the air if they dare criticise leadership and speaking out can land you in prison - never mind that in fact Ukraine has outlawed opposition parties, takes dissenting TV and radio stations off air and arrests people for following pro-Russian Telegram channels.
Western media tend not to give any examples of Russian oppression, but if they do then they might use the example of Dozhd TV, a Russian TV station that was declared a ‘foreign agent’ and taken off the air in March 2022 for disseminating “false information about Russian Armed Forces’ losses during the special operation in Ukraine and civilian casualties”. The station then set up shop in Latvia, but ironically its license was revoked and the channel was fined in December 2022 as a result of a presenter saying that the channel helps the Russian army fighting in Ukraine - a very unusual admission, given the channel’s output. So they got banned in Russia for lying about the Russian army, then banned in Latvia for admitting to helping them; free speech only gets you so far in the freedom-loving west.
The idea that media critical of the government is banned in Russia is very easily disproved by the continued existence of The Moscow Times, a news outlet every bit as anti-Putin as any of the mainstream western media, and there are others like it.
While opinion on the Ukraine conflict in western media is limited to discussing how much we should all hate Putin and blame him for everything, English-language media in Russia or made by Russians has a variety of much more nuanced views on the conflict. There are the aforementioned 'liberal’ media (Moscow Times et al) that take the same line as the western liberal media, and there are state-sponsored outlets like RT and Sputnik that report on Russian politics in much the same way the BBC does British politics, but there are also a wealth of independent voices in the blogosphere. I’ve already expressed my admiration for The Saker blog (written by Russian ex-pat living in Florida Andrei Raevsky), which stopped publishing articles at the end of February 2023 and which was subject to frequent DDoS attacks. There is Andrei Martyanov’s blog and Youtube vlogs on Russian military matters. Donbass Insider is run by French journalist Christelle Néant, who spends a lot of time in Donetsk and who tells stories about the ongoing conflict from her own point of view, and has also been the subject of DDoS attacks - you need only take a look at some of her stories to see why that is.
On Substack, there is excellent military analyis at Simplicius’s Garden of Knowledge. Simplicius, like the others mentioned above, is generally positive about the Russian army and its intentions, but there are also a number of writers who, although they support Russia’s SMO and fully understand that the Nazis in Ukraine are real, dangerous and very much supported by the west, are much more cynical when it comes to Putin and others in the Russian government.
Rolo Slavskiy, author of The Slavland Chronicles, was very supportive of Evgeniy Prigozhin when he posted his angry video rant accusing Defence Minister Shoigu of failing to supply Wagner with the ammunition they needed to continue to take Bakhmut. Rolo’s no big fan of Putin, and has accused him of being a tool of the neoliberal elite that wants to carve up Russia again like they did after the fall of the USSR. Rolo conducted an interview with Russell ‘Texas’ Bentley, AKA The Donbass Cowboy, an American who has been fighting alongside the DPR/LPR militias since 2014, and they are both in agreement that Shoigu has let down Wagner. They are scathing of the Russian army (as distinct from Wagner or the DPR/LPR militias); it’s strange to listen to people who are well aware that the western media is lying about Russia, but still say some of the same things the western media does when it comes to the Russian ‘deep state’. Horseshoe theory and all that.
Rolo is also scathing of Alexander Mercouris (and to a lesser extent Alex Christoforou) of The Duran, which I find jarring since they have been amongst my go-to listens to find out what is going on in Ukraine, and they have seemed to me to be pretty on point. Rolo and Bentley are both dismissive of the Andreis Martyanov and Raevsky, as well as Col Douglas MacGregor and Scott Ritter (who have both been vocal in their criticism of US foreign policy), characterising them as grifters using the Ukraine war for self-promotion. Bentley says that he has lost many friends amongst the Donbass militias and he’s on the frontline there himself, so it’s perhaps not surprising that he is contemptuous of commentators sitting in comfort thousands of miles away, criticising Prigozhin.
To read and listen to these wildly differing opinions - all of which would be dismissed as pro-Russian propaganda by western media - disagreeing with each other so vehemently despite their shared understanding of the reality of the war, is strangely invigorating for a former western media consumer. It’s like surfacing after being underwater, no longer insulated from the noise outside. It serves to underline just how blinkered and shallow western media is, wherein there is a rabidly anti-Russian party line that writers stick to, probably even believing it themselves, and if there is any debate at all then it is over minutiae.
The western mainstream media environment has been compared to that of the USSR in its last years, with the crucial difference that most people in the USSR knew that Pravda was lying to them but had no alternative. The majority in the west choose to consume media that is lying to them and to believe it, and choose to believe that anything that contradicts it must be false. How do you go about showing a brainwashed person that they are brainwashed?